Love by the Glass: Tasting Notes from a Marriage - Hardcover

Gaiter, Dorothy J.; Brecher, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375505601 ISBN 13: 9780375505607

Verlag: Villard Books, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

The authors of The Wall Street Journal's "Tastings" column describe how their mutual love of wine brought them together and discuss their journalism careers and ways in which their search for the perfect grape has shaped and molded their lives. 50,000 first printing.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher are the authors of <i>Tastings</i>, the weekly wine column of <i>The Wall Street Journal</i>. John was Page One editor of the paper from 1992 to 2000, and Dorothy was a national reporter and editor covering issues of race. John previously worked at <i>The Miami Herald</i> and <i>Newsweek</i>, and Dorothy at <i>The Miami Herald</i> and <i>The New York Times</i>. They are known to television viewers from their appearances on <i>Martha Stewart Livin</i>g and <i>Today</i>, and are the authors of <b>The Wall Street Journal Guide to Wine</b>.

Aus dem Klappentext

deeply inspired by this heartwarming story of how two people found love and―even better―a way to get paid for drinking wine.” ―Dave Barry <br><br>Internationally renowned journalists Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher present a captivating memoir about falling in love with each other and with wine. <br><br>She grew up in the all-black environment of Florida A&M University in Tallahassee. He was raised in Jacksonville, Florida, where his was one of a handful of Jewish families. When they met on June 4, 1973, in the newsroom of The Miami Herald, she says, “I felt in my bones like I had known him forever.” And he says, “I felt the instant I saw her that we had always been together, and knew we always would be.”<br><br>That passion for each other and for wine has made their column a must-read for millions of neophyte and veteran wine lovers, who also follow their appearances on Martha Stewart’s TV show. The annual global celebrati

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One
André Cold Duck

The first wine we shared was André Cold Duck. Hey, don’t laugh. Okay, go ahead and laugh. It was a big deal then, a bizarre concoction with a bizarre label. The name Cold Duck was derived somehow from the German practice of blending already opened bottles of red, white, and sparkling wines so they wouldn’t go to waste. The resulting cuvée was called kalte Ende or “cold end,” which sounds like kalte Ente, which means “cold duck.” In the early 1960s, David Gallo, who was co-president of the E. & J. Gallo Winery and the oldest son of Ernest Gallo, figured there was room in the market for a nationally marketed, inexpensive “domestic Champagne.” So in 1965, when he was working in marketing, he oversaw the development and introduction of André Champagne. Two years later, he developed André Cold Duck, which was a red, sweet sparkling wine made from Concord grapes. By 1971, the winery was selling two million cases of it a year.

John’s parents gave him a bottle as a housewarming present, and it sat in his refrigerator for months. John was posted to South Dade County, then the more rural part of the county. It turns out that being “South Dade bureau chief” meant he got a tiny little office in a town called Homestead and a massive area to cover by himself. Dottie was a general assignment reporter in the main office, a lumpen structure on Biscayne Bay, where we worked together every Sunday. As the weeks went on, we found it was fun to have lunch together along with a couple of other new reporters. Then we started to wait until the other reporters were out of the office and we would rush off to lunch alone. We could talk for hours, as though we were the only people in the world. We were so much alike in our outlooks and values that it was as though we’d been raised by the same parents. We even had a joint byline together, on a story about the annual New Year’s Eve riot on Miami Beach. While we were dodging tear gas, a sweet thing happened. A drunken reveler stumbled up to us and drawled, “You two are beautiful together, man.” Was it that obvious that there was something between us?

After months of rushing off together whenever we could, John mentioned to Dottie a story he was doing about U-Pick fields. Those were South Dade farms where you could pick your own food. It was fun, it was cheap, and it was a great story for the Herald’s weekend section. Maybe I could show you the U-Pick fields sometime, John suggested.

Without knowing it, John had touched Dottie’s most vulnerable area: fruits and vegetables. Dottie is passionate about them. She had inherited that from her mother, whose father had grown cherries, peaches, mint, and corn. The date was set. On a beautiful winter day, we picked squash and lima beans and snap peas and eggplant and the most beautiful strawberries Dottie had ever seen. She sat on the ground and ate them, still warm from the sun, right off the plant. John thought he’d never seen anyone so pure, happy, and beautiful. We took all of the bounty to John’s little one-bedroom apartment. Dottie simply sautéed the vegetables in butter and served them over rice that John had cooked.

Sweet, sparkling red wine is not a classic match with sautéed vegetables over rice, but that night, on our first date, no wine could have been better. We woke up the next morning as a couple.

It wasn’t long before we told our parents.

John: I had mentioned to my parents on the day I arrived at the Herald that I’d started work with two black women, and one was really cute. One night, when my father answered the phone, I said, “I’m actually dating someone.” This surely pleased my father, who was concerned that I had been lonely for all of those months down in Homestead. My parents had visited a couple of times, and they were pretty much appalled by my rental furniture and solitary life. “That’s great!” said my father. “Who is she?”

“She’s one of the reporters I started with,” I said. “The cute one.”

There was a momentary pause. “She’s black, isn’t she?” asked my father. “Yes,” I said. My parents didn’t raise the issue again.

Dottie: When I called home, I told my father I was dating a colleague named John. “We started on the same day, he went to Columbia, and he’s white and really nice,” I said, rushing through the salient part. There was a momentary pause. “Well,” my dad said, selecting his words carefully, “we always taught you to choose your friends by the content of their character.” He had paraphrased Martin Luther King Jr. And that was it.

In our first years together, we moved around a lot within South Florida. John became an editor and moved up the Herald’s career ladder, from South Dade to North Dade to Palm Beach County and back to Miami. Dottie moved up to bigger reporting jobs, from general assignment in Miami to school reporter in Fort Lauderdale to beat reporter back in Miami. We worked all the time—we were journalists, committed to changing the world, after all, and it was an exciting time for journalism. John’s first front-page byline was about a gas station owner during the Arab oil embargo who forced motorists to buy his daughter’s Girl Scout cookies if they wanted a fill-up. Our nascent interest in wine was our respite.

We started with Blue Nun. In Florida, supermarkets can sell wine, so when we shopped, we’d walk down a long aisle of so-so wines. In 1974, we certainly didn’t know much about wine, though The Signet Book of Wine had piqued John’s interest, and then Dottie’s. When we were in the grocery store one day, we picked up a wine we’d seen advertised and that we knew to be popular: Blue Nun.

Blue Nun was a German wine that few Germans drank. It was a Liebfraumilch, which means “Milk of Our Blessed Mother.” It is, in many ways, simply a low-end, generic German wine. As far back as 1910, an official body in Germany declared that Liebfraumilch was nothing but “a fancy name.” The Sichel family of Mainz, Germany, made Blue Nun, and some of it was sold in the United States, even during Prohibition. The label back then showed a nun in a brown habit on a blue background. Peter Sichel, who represents the fourth generation of the family, which later became importers, says that as the wine became popular, customers and distributors started referring to it as “that wine with the blue nun label.” After Prohibition was repealed, sales took off in the United States and the label was changed to read “Blue Nun Label.” But there was a hitch. Because of religious concerns, the federal government, which has to approve all wine labels, decided it couldn’t really allow a nun on the label, so post-Prohibition labels sported a picture of farm girls, Mr. Sichel says. After arguing that other countries with large populations of Catholics allowed the labels to have a nun on them, Mr. Sichel got his way. It wasn’t until 1963, though, that the word label was dropped from the label.

Blue Nun was low in alcohol, inexpensive, and slightly sweet. For a country that, on the whole, still didn’t know or much like the taste of real wine, it was perfect. Sales went crazy. In 1959, ten thousand cases of it were sold in the United States. By the late 1980s, two million cases of Blue Nun were bought worldwide, 1.2 million of those cases in the United States. In fact, Blue Nun was so popular that one day we even bought a knockoff called Blue Monk. Then White Zinfandel entered the market and started sinking Blue Nun,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Villard Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2002
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0375505601
• ISBN 13: 9780375505607
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 316
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar